Moken大学英语英语高级视听说下

英语高级视听说下册Unit4Almost 25 years ago, 60 Minutes introduced viewers to George Finn, whose talent was immortalized in the movie "Rain Man." George has a condition known as savant syndrome, a mysterious disorder of the brain where someone has a spectacular skill, even genius, in a mind that is otherwise extremely limited.Morley Safer met another savant, Daniel Tammet, who is called "Brain Man" in Britain. But unlike most savants, he has no obvious mental disability, and most important to scientists, he can describe his own thought process. He may very well be a scientific Rosetta stone, a key to understanding the brain.________________________________________Back in 1983, George Finn, blessed or obsessed with calendar calculation, could give you the day if you gave him the date."What day of the week was August 13th, 1911?" Safer quizzed Finn."A Sunday," Finn replied."What day of the week was May 20th, 1921?" Safer asked."Friday," Finn answered.George Finn is a savant. In more politically incorrect times he would have been called an "idiot savant" - a mentallyhandicapped or autistic person whose brain somehow possesses an island of brilliance.Asked if he knew how he does it, Finn told Safer, "I don't know, but it's just that, that's fantastic I can do that."If this all seems familiar, there?s a reason: five years after the 60 Minutes broadcast, Dustin Hoffman immortalized savants like George in the movie "Rain Man."Which brings us to that other savant we mentioned: Daniel Tammet. He is an Englishman, who is a 27-year-old math and memory wizard."I was born November 8th, 1931," Safer remarks."Uh-huh. That's a prime number. 1931. And you were born on a Sunday. And this year, your birthday will be on a Wednesday. And you'll be 75," Tammet tells Safer.It is estimated there are only 50 true savants living in the world today, and yet none are like Daniel. He is articulate, self-sufficient, blessed with all of the spectacular ability of a savant, but with very little of the disability. Take his math skill, for example.Asked to multiply 31 by 31 by 31 by 31, Tammet quickly - and accurately - responded with "923,521."And it?s not just calculating. His gift of memory is stunning.Briefly show him a long numerical sequence and he?ll recite it right back to you. And he can do it backwards, to boot.That feat is just a warm-up for Daniel Tammet. He first made headlines at Oxford, when he publicly recited the endless sequence of numbers embodied by the Greek letter "Pi." Pi, the numbers we use to calculate the dimensions of a circle, are usually rounded off to 3.14. But its numbers actually go on to infinity.Daniel studied the sequence - a thousand numbers to a page."And I would sit and I would gorge on them. And I would just absorb hundreds and hundreds at a time," he tells Safer.It took him several weeks to prepare and then Daniel headed to Oxford, where with number crunchers checking every digit, he opened the floodgates of his extraordinary memory.Tammet says he was able to recite, in a proper order, 22,514 numbers. It took him over five hours and he did it without a single mistake.Scientists say a memory feat like this is truly extraordinary. Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and his team at the California Center for Brain Study tested Daniel extensively after his Pi achievement.What did he make of him?"I was surprised at how articulate and intelligent he was, andwas able to interact socially and introspect on his own-abilities," says Dr. Ramachandran.And while that introspection is extremely rare among savants, Daniel?s ability to describe how his mind works could be invaluable to scientists studying the brain, our least understood organ."Even how you and I do 17 minus nine is a big mystery. You know, how are these little wisps of jelly in your brain doing that computation? We don't know that," Dr. Ramachandran explains.It may seem to defy logic, but Ramachandran believes that a savant?s genius could actually result from brain injury. "One possibility is that many other parts of the brain are functioning abnormally or sub-normally. And this allows the patient to allocate all his attentional resources to the one remaining part," he explains. "And there's a lot of clinical evidence for this. Some patients have a stroke and suddenly, their artistic skills improve."That theory fits well with Daniel. At the age of four, he suffered a massive epileptic seizure. He believes that seizure contributed to his condition. Numbers were no longer simply numbers and he had developed a rare crossing of the senses known as synesthesia."I see numbers in my head as colors and shapes and textures. So when I see a long sequence, the sequence forms landscapes in my mind," Tammet explains. "Every number up to 10,000, I can visualize in this way, has it's own color, has it's own shape, has it'sown texture."For example, when Daniel says he sees Pi, he does those instant computations, he is not calculating, but says the answer simply appears to him as a landscape of colorful shapes."The shapes aren't static. They're full of color. They're full of texture. In a sense, they're full of life," he says.Asked if they?re beautiful, Tammet says, "Not all of them. Some of them are ugly. 289 is an ugly number. I don't like it very much. Whereas 333, for example, is beautiful to me. It's round. It's?.""Chubby," Safer remarks.'It's-yes. It's chubby,' Tammet agrees.Yet even with the development of these extraordinary abilities as a child, nobody sensed that Daniel was a prodigy, including his mother, Jennifer. But he was different."He was constantly counting things," Jennifer remembers. "I think, what first attracted him to books, was the actual numbers on each page. And he just loved counting."Asked if she thinks there?s a connection between his epilepsy and his rare talent, she tells Safer, "He was always different f rom-when he was really a few weeks old, I noticed he was different. So I'm not sure that it's entirely that, but I think it mighthave escalated it."Daniel was also diagnosed with Asperger?s Syndrome-a mild form of autism. It made for a painful childhood."I would flap my hands sometimes when I was excited, or pull at my fingers, and pull at my lips," Tammet remembers. "And of course, the children saw these things and would repeat them back to me, and tease me about them. And I would put my fingers in my ears and count very quickly in powers of two. Two, four, eight, 16, 32, 64.""Numbers were my friends. And they never changed. So, they were reliable. I could trust them," he says.And yet, Daniel did not retreat fully into that mysterious prison of autism, as many savants do. He believes his large family may have actually forced him to adapt."Because my parents, having nine children, had so much to do, so much to cope with, I realized I had to do for myself," he says.He now runs his own online educational business. He and his partner Neil try to keep a low profile, despite his growing fame.Yet the limits of his autism are always there. "I find it difficult to walk in the street sometimes if there are lots of people around me. If there's lots of noise, I put my fingers in my ears to block it out,' he says.That anxiety keeps him close to home. He can?t drive, rarely goes shopping, and finds the beach a difficult place because of his compulsion to count the grains of sand. And it manifests itself in other ways, like making a very precise measurement of his cereal each morning: it must be exactly 45 grams of porridge, no more, no less.Daniel was recently profiled in a British documentary called ?Brainman.? The producers posed a challenge that he could not pass up: Learn a foreign language in a week - and not just any foreign language, but Icelandic, considered to be one of the most difficult languages to learn.In Iceland, he studied and practiced with a tutor. When the moment of truth came and he appeared on TV live with a host, the host said, "I was amazed. He was responding to our questions. He did understand them very well and I thought that his grammar was very good. We are very proud of our language and that someone is able to speak it after only one week, that?s just great.""Do you think that Daniel, in a certain way, represents a real pathway to further understanding the brain?" Safer asks Dr. Ramachandran."I think one could say that time and again in science, something that looks like a curiosity initially often leads to a completely new direction of research," Ramachandran replies. "Sometimes, they provide the golden key. Doesn't always happen.Sometimes it's just mumbo-jumbo. But that may well be true with savants."Daniel continues to volunteer for scientists who want to understand his amazing brain. But he is reluctant to become what he calls ?a performing seal? and has refused most offers to cash in on his remarkable skills."People all the time asking me to choose numbers for the lottery. Or to invent a time machine. Or to come up with some great discovery," he explains. "But my abilities are not those that mean that I can do at everything."But he has written a book about his experiences, entitled "Born on a Blue Day."He also does motivational speeches for parents of autistic children-yet one more gift of his remarkable brain.But at the end of the day-genius or not-that brain does work a little differently."One hour after we leave today, and I will not remember what you look like. And I will find it difficult to recognize you, if I see you again. I will remember your handkerchief. And I will remember you have four buttons on your sleeve. And I'll remember the type of tie you're wearing. It's the details that I remember," Tammet tells Safer.And it?s the details that make us all so different. One manmay see numbers as a tedious necessity of modern life, another sees them as the essence of life."Pi is one of the most beautiful things in all the world and if I can share that joy in numbers, if I can share that in some small measure with the world through my writing and through my speaking, then I feel that I will have done something useful," he says.。

《高级英语视听说（第二版）》教师用书第二版说明《高级英语视听说》为专业英语课程教材，供高等院校英语专业高年级本科生使用；同时也为高等院校非英语专业高年级本科生使用。

近些年，大学英语及专门用途英语教学改革成果显著，非英语专业学生的英语水平提高很大，有些甚至好于英语专业的学生。

教师和学生都感到特别需要更高要求、更深程度内容的英语教材满足这部分学生的智力和情感需求。

这套教材既是很好的选择。

本教材还可以供研究生英语课程使用，供有同等英语水平的自学者和工作者使用。

本套教材于2008年荣获北京市精品教材奖。

目前已经重印十余次，受到教师和学生的广泛欢迎。

第二版教材去掉五部旧片，换上五部新片，其中三部电影，一部纪录片，以跟进时代。

它们分别是《黑天鹅》、《帮助》、《朗读者》和《精神病人》。

这些片子已在北外的课堂使用过，深受学生们喜爱。

单元安排根据学生的兴趣、影片的新旧、影片的难易重新做了调整，现在的安排给人一种全新的感受。

教师也可以按照自己的考虑、学生的水平重新安排一学期的课程顺序。

第二版教材建议每周学习一部片子，所用学时两小时。

网络的发展以及各学校音视频的建设使学生随时可以看到新片，这样使一周完成学生课前的准备及课上的讨论成为了可能。

我们衷心希望第二版能够受到更多教师和学生的喜爱。

在内容带给我们更多挑战的同时，也希望带给我们更多思考的快乐。

主编：王镇平2013年4月23日编写理念21世纪是一个以经济全球化和信息化为显著特征的时代，我们的人才培养目标要适应这个时代，我们的教材则要适应这个新的培养目标。

英语专业培养的人才应该是具有扎实的英语语言基础和广博的英语文化知识，并能在不同的工作和研究领域熟练运用英语的复合型人才，要同时兼具组织能力、实践能力和创新能力。

这套教材就是在这样的需求中应运而生的。

根据2000年《高等院校英语专业英语教学大纲》（以下简称《大纲》）的要求，21世纪外语专业教材应具有以下几个特征：教材内容和语言能够反映快速变化的时代；教材能处理好专业知识、语言训练和相关学科知识之间的关系；教材不仅仅着眼于知识的传授，还有助于学生的鉴赏批判能力、思维能力和创新能力的培养；教学内容有较强的实用性和针对性；注意充分利用计算机、多媒体、网络等现代化的技术手段。

Burning RageThis story originally aired on Nov. 13, 2005.When they first emerged in the mid-1990s, the environmental extremists calling themselves the "Earth Liberation Front" announced they were "the burning rage of a dying planet."Ever since, the ELF, along with its sister group, the Animal Liberation Front, has been burning everything from SUV dealerships to research labs to housing developments.In the last decade, these so-called "Eco-terrorists" have been responsible for more than $100 million in damages. And their tactics are beginning to escalate.Some splinter groups have set off homemade bombs and threatened to kill people. As correspondent Ed Bradley first reported last November, things have gotten so bad, the FBI now considers them the country's biggest domestic terrorist threat.The biggest act of eco-terrorism in U.S. history was a fire, deliberately set on the night of August 1, 2003, that destroyed a nearly-completed $23 million apartment complex just outside San Diego. The fire was set to protest urban sprawl."It was the biggest fire I have ever responded to as a firefighter," remembers Jeff Carle, a division chief for the San Diego Fire Department. "That fire was not stoppable. At the stage that the fire was in when we arrived, there were problems in the adjacent occupied apartment complexes. Pine trees were starting to catch fire. Items on patios were starting to light up and catch fire. And we had to direct our activity towards saving life before we could do anything about the property."Hundreds were roused from their beds and evacuated. Luckily, nobody –including firefighters – was injured. By the time the fire burned itself out the next morning, all that remained was a 12-foot-long banner that read: "If you build it, we will burn it." Also on the banner was the acronym: E-L-F.When Carle saw the banner, he says he knew he had a problem.A problem, because he knew what ELF stood for: the Earth Liberation Front, the most radical fringe of the environmental movement. It's the same group that set nine simultaneous fires across the Vail Mountain ski resort in 1998 to protest its expansion, causing $12 million in damage.And it is the same group that has left SUV dealerships across America looking like scenes from Iraq's Sunni triangle, their way of protesting the gas-guzzling habits of American car buyers.The ELF is a spin-off of another group called the ALF, or Animal Liberation Front, whose masked members have been known to videotape themselves breaking into research labs, where they destroy years of painstaking work and free captive animals. In recent years, they've capped off their visits by burning down the buildings. Still, they insist they are non-violent."For every arson that I've carried out, there's probably three or four that were not carried out for that fear of injuring somebody," says Rod Coronado, a former ALF leader, who is widely-credited with introducing arson to the cause.He spent four years in prison for setting six fires, including one at Michigan State University.Why burn down a building?"It's simply because after years of rescuing animals from laboratories, it was heartbreaking to see those buildings and those cages refilled within the following days. And for that reason, arson has become a necessary tool," says Coronado.Coronado says the ALF and ELF operate in small autonomous "cells." He says he usually worked with five or less people.Asked how after choosing a target, a mission is carried out, Coronado says, "Those are the types of things that take nights and nights and weeks and weeks of reconnaissance to make sure that you know in the one hour that you're going to take action, that there will be absolutely no risk to any living being. The fact that nobody was ever injured in any of the actions that I've been accused of is not a coincidence."Coronado says these days, he's simply an unofficial spokesperson for the ALF and ELF. And in that role, he travels across the country giving lectures on the groups' philosophies and tactics.Many in law enforcement believe Coronado is still active in the movement as an organizer and recruiter. He recently found a GPS tracking device under his Jeep, which he believes was planted by the FBI. And, he just happened to have a speaking engagement in San Diego the day after the fire.Coronado says he knew nothing about the condo complex fire, yet he has traveled around the country and encourage people to do this sort of thing."Encouragement through explanation and demonstration of my own actions," says Coronado. "I've showed them how I set fires. I showed them how the ELF and the ALF, what their mode of operation is.""I'm asking for people courageous enough to take those risks for what they believe in," said Coronado.60 Minutes was surprised when one of those people, a man claiming to be an active ALF cell leader, came out of the shadows to grant what he called "the group's first on camera interview in 20 years," as long as we didn't see his face or record his voice.He told us that his cell has conducted operations from coast to coast, and every one of them was what he considered to be non-violent because nobody was injured. He said under the mask he is a normal, otherwise law-abiding citizen, and that his friends and family have no idea about his activities. He said he thinks it's "abysmal" that the FBI considers them America's top domestic terrorist threat, because unlike neo-Nazi groups, the ALF has never hurt anyone."Having the FBI chase you around is not a good thing," says John Lewis, a Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism at the FBI. Lewis is the man charged with stamping out eco-terrorism in the United States.Lewis says the bureau is aware of over 1,000 attacks and says these groups are considered such a threat is because they have caused over $100 million worth of damage nationwide. He says there are more than 150 investigations of eco-terrorist crimes underway.He admits they're not in the same league as al Qaeda but he says they're ratcheting up their actions and turning up the rhetoric."There have been multiple statements made regarding assassination and/or killing of individuals involved in, for instance, biomedical research and that kind of thing," says Lewis.Case in point is Dr. Jerry Vlasak, a practicing trauma surgeon in Los Angeles, who also acts as a spokesperson for several extreme animal rights groups. Vlasak has told audiences that it's time to consider assassinating people who do research on animals.Vlasak has been quoted as saying 'I think for five lives, ten lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, two million, ten million nonhuman lives.'"I think people who torture innocent beings should be stopped. And if they won't stop when you ask them nicely, they won't stop when you demonstrate to them what they're doing is wrong, then they should be stopped using whatever means necessary," Vlasak replied.Vlasak says he is not going to do that, pointing out he is a physician. "My role in the movement is not to go out and do that, but to explain to the mainstream media and to the public in general why these people are doing what they're doing."Asked if Vlasak wants someone to go out there and kill, Vlasak says, "I want people who care about animals to do what's necessary to stop their exploitation, to stop their suffering."Vlasak says someone who believes that the life of an animal is not akin to the life of a human being is "species-ist."Species-ists, he says, are akin to racists or sexists. Animals, he says, should be accorded the same rights as human beings, despite their place on the food chain."Just like at one time black humans were considered property. Well, dogs, cats and all other animals in our society are still considered property," Vlasak says.Asked who he thinks is fair game, Vlasak says, "Well, I think anybody that tortures animals for a living or for a profit and who won't stop when they're asked to and won't stop."Does that include researchers who are testing and performing tests using animals?""Animal researchers, slaughterhouse workers, the head of the corporation that slaughters hundreds of millions of chickens every single year for the taste of their flesh," says Vlasak. Well, people like chicken."People liked owning slaves too, okay. That doesn't make it right," Vlasak said.Vlasak says it's very straightforward in his mind."We don't live in a country where it's okay to kill people if we don't necessarily. Like what they're doing. If we have someone who actively embraces this then what's next?" says John Lewis.What's next, he says, is the emergence of a "lone wolf" like Eric Rudolph or Ted Kaczynski, something that has already happened.A mysterious bomber was caught on surveillance camera in 2003 planting two sophisticated explosive devices late at night outside a company that makes vaccines in northern California, a company targeted by animal rights activists. One bomb was set to go off an hour after the first - after firemen and police arrived – but it was spotted by a night watchman. A few weeks later a third bomb went off outside another company, this one strapped with nails."Anyone from 50 feet of that particular bomb probably would have been killed or seriously injured," says the FBI's David Strange, who is in charge of the investigation.Strange thinks the second explosive was designed to hurt or kill the first responders that show up to the scene. He says it was the first time he heard of eco-terrorists using bombs.Strange says the FBI has identified the suspected bomber as Daniel Andreas San Diego, a 27-year-old animal rights activist from San Rafael, California, who is now a fugitive after he slipped an FBI surveillance team.But he left behind a message, posted on a Web site sympathetic to the Animal Liberation Front. Part of it reads, "We will now be doubling the size of every device we make.""I'll ask you. Why does someone build an improvised explosive device with shrapnel, nails and such, if they're not intending to cause someone grievous harm if not worse?" says Lewis.There is a definite split in the movement when it comes to violence.After torching a forest research station in Irvine, Pennsylvania, one ELF cell threatened to "pick up the gun.""I think it's sort off disingenuous to say 'Well, we can burn down buildings. But we can't use explosives. Or we can use explosives. But we can't do anything that might harm a person.' I think what we have to do is look at the big picture. We have to look at what works," says Dr. Jerry Vlasak.Since our report first aired last fall, the FBI announced the arrests of 11 people, saying they were part of a criminal group that called themselves "The Family." They're accused ofcommitting over a dozen arsons and other acts of sabotage nationwide, including those fires on top of Vail Mountain.By Graham Messick。

《高级英语视听说（第二版）》教师用书第二版说明《高级英语视听说》为专业英语课程教材，供高等院校英语专业高年级本科生使用；同时也为高等院校非英语专业高年级本科生使用。

近些年，大学英语及专门用途英语教学改革成果显著，非英语专业学生的英语水平提高很大，有些甚至好于英语专业的学生。

教师和学生都感到特别需要更高要求、更深程度内容的英语教材满足这部分学生的智力和情感需求。

这套教材既是很好的选择。

本教材还可以供研究生英语课程使用，供有同等英语水平的自学者和工作者使用。

本套教材于2008年荣获北京市精品教材奖。

目前已经重印十余次，受到教师和学生的广泛欢迎。

第二版教材去掉五部旧片，换上五部新片，其中三部电影，一部纪录片，以跟进时代。

它们分别是《黑天鹅》、《帮助》、《朗读者》和《精神病人》。

这些片子已在北外的课堂使用过，深受学生们喜爱。

单元安排根据学生的兴趣、影片的新旧、影片的难易重新做了调整，现在的安排给人一种全新的感受。

教师也可以按照自己的考虑、学生的水平重新安排一学期的课程顺序。

第二版教材建议每周学习一部片子，所用学时两小时。

网络的发展以及各学校音视频的建设使学生随时可以看到新片，这样使一周完成学生课前的准备及课上的讨论成为了可能。

我们衷心希望第二版能够受到更多教师和学生的喜爱。

在内容带给我们更多挑战的同时，也希望带给我们更多思考的快乐。

主编：王镇平2013年4月23日编写理念21世纪是一个以经济全球化和信息化为显著特征的时代，我们的人才培养目标要适应这个时代，我们的教材则要适应这个新的培养目标。

英语专业培养的人才应该是具有扎实的英语语言基础和广博的英语文化知识，并能在不同的工作和研究领域熟练运用英语的复合型人才，要同时兼具组织能力、实践能力和创新能力。

这套教材就是在这样的需求中应运而生的。

根据2000年《高等院校英语专业英语教学大纲》（以下简称《大纲》）的要求，21世纪外语专业教材应具有以下几个特征：教材内容和语言能够反映快速变化的时代；教材能处理好专业知识、语言训练和相关学科知识之间的关系；教材不仅仅着眼于知识的传授，还有助于学生的鉴赏批判能力、思维能力和创新能力的培养；教学内容有较强的实用性和针对性；注意充分利用计算机、多媒体、网络等现代化的技术手段。

We all know how ships are born, how majestic vessels are nudged into the ocean with a bottle of champagne. But few of us know how they die. And hundreds of ships meet their death every year. From five-star ocean liners, to grubby freighters, literally dumped with all their steel, their asbestos, their toxins on the beaches of some the poorest countries in the world, countries like Bangladesh.You can't really believe how bad it is here, until you see it. It could be as close as you'll get to hell on earth, with the smoke, the fumes, and the heat. The men who labor here are the wretched of the earth, doing dirty, dangerous work, for little more than $1 a day.It's not much of a final resting place, this desolate beach near the city of Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal. Ships are lined up here as at any port, but they'll never leave. Instead, they will be dissected, bolt by bolt, rivet by rivet, every piece of metal destined for the furnaces to be melted down and fashioned into steel rods. The ships don't die easily - they are built to float, not to be ripped apart, spilling toxins, oil and sludge into the surrounding seas.The men who work here are dwarfed by the ships they are destroying. And they dissect the ships by hand. The most sophisticated technology on the beach is a blowtorch. The men carry metal plates, each weighing more than a ton from the shoreline to waiting trucks, walking in step like pallbearers, or like members of a chain gang. They paint images of where they would like to be on the trucks - pictures of paradise far from this wasteland.And when night falls, the work continues and the beach becomes an inferno of smoke and flames and filth.This industry, which employs thousands and supplies Bangladesh with almost all its steel, began with an accident - a cyclone to be precise. In 1965, a violent storm left a giant cargo ship beached on what was then a pristine coastline. It didn't take long before people began ripping the ship apart. They took everything and businessmen took note - perhaps they didn't need a storm to bring ships onto this beach here.Mohammed Mohsin's family has become extremely wealthy bringing ships onto these beaches. He pays millions of dollars for each ship and makes his profit from the steel he sells. The name of his company is PHP, which stands for Peace, Happiness and Prosperity.His latest acquisition is a ship weighing in at 4,000 tons but Mohsin tells Simon that's small by comparison to other vessels that have been gutted on the beaches. They have handled ships as large as 68,000 tons.This the first time Mohsin has seen the 4,000 ton ship close up. In fact buying a ship is not at all like buying a car. He didn't even need to see a picture before he bought it for $14 million. All he needed to know was its weight and how much the owners were charging for each ton of steel.One of the single most valuable parts of the ship is the propeller. The "small" ships propeller is worth around $35,000 alone, Mohsin estimates.It may be a small ship to Mohsin, but getting onto it from the beach is still a bit delicate.Mohsin's ships don't have seafaring captains anymore - he is the captain now of dying ships and the captain of one of the largest of 30 shipyards on this 10-mile stretch of beach. Some 100 ships are ripped apart on the beach each year, most of them from the west."It is the west's garbage dump," says Roland Buerk, who lives in Bangladesh. He spent a year in these yards, writing a book about the industry. 60 Minutes hired him to guide Simon through the tangled world of shipbreaking.To do the same work in America or England would be very expensive."It would be because in Europe and America when they do this, they do it in dry docks," Buerk explains. "So in actual fact, the owners of these ships are selling them to the yard owners here to break up. If they had to do it in America, they'd have to pay for that process to be carried out. So you see it makes real economic sense to do it here.""So old, out-dated ships that were previously a liability, are now an asset," Simon remarks."Exactly," Buerk agrees. "And that's why they end up on these shores."They are the shores of the most densely populated nation and one of the poorest nations in the world. Bangladesh desperately needs steel for construction but has no iron ore mines. The shipbreaking yards are its mines, providing 80 percent of the nation's steel.But steel is only part of the deal; there are so many things on a ship which are sold off. It is in fact a gigantic recycling operation.You can find everything, including kitchen sinks, at a sprawling roadside market which goes on for miles. When you're driving down this road, it's not a problem if you need a toilet or a life boat or a light bulb. It is estimated that 97 percent of the ship's contents are recycled. The other three percent, the stuff nobody would buy, including the hazardous waste, asbestos, arsenic and mercury, are left behind to foul the beaches."And what we're looking at, which is a recycling operation, is also an environmental disaster," Simon says."That's true. And I think this is really capitalism as red in tooth and claw as it gets. At the moment this is what makes financial sense for everybody. And this is, despite the fact that we might not like it, and it doesn't look pretty, this is how it's done," Buerk says.The workers toil in tough conditions. They have no unions, no safety equipment, and no training. About 50 are said to die in accidents each year; often in explosions set off by blowtorches deep inside the fume-filled holds.You see casualties in the yards, men who were injured here but have no money to go anywhere else. The workers are housed in barracks with no beds, just steel plates scavenged from the ships they break.Many of the workers are not old enough to grow a beard. Some are, quite simply, children. 60 Minutes spoke to several who said they were 14 and had been working here for two years.So what does the man from Peace Happiness and Prosperity say about that?Asked if there are any children working in his yard, Mohsin says, "Not my yard.""Well, we talked to several children," Simon tells Mohsin. "We found a couple who were 14 and said they'd been working there for a couple of years.""They are - if they are working - if they don't work, what they'll do, then? Our government cannot afford it. Their food, shelter and clothing has to be provided by someone whether their parents or the government. None of them can afford it. So what they gonna do?" Mohsin argues."So, you say that child labor is inevitable, necessary in Bangladesh?" Simon asks."If they don't work in ship-breaking yard, they'll work somewhere else. They have to," Mohsin replies.But child labor is only one of the issues. Environmentalists have been doing battle with the industry for years. They say the west has no business dumping its toxic waste on impoverished lands in the east. They condemn the appalling work conditions, the low pay, and the lack of accountability for workers who are killed or injured. Their most important proposal: that ships be cleaned of their toxic materials in the west, before they sail to Bangladesh.That's in line with an international ban which prohibits the shipment of hazardous waste from rich countries to poorer countries.Rezwana Hasan of the Bangladeshi Environmental Lawyers Association is in the forefront of the battle against the industry. She says the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh don't respect even the most minimal environmental standards."And an industry that can't comply with these minimum standards must not operate," she argues. "I mean if you can't comply with the - if you can't pay your worker the minimum wage, you can't operate. You can't - if you can't ensure the minimum environmental safeguard you shouldn't operate." But the owners of the yards argue that environmentalism is a luxury, reserved for the rich nations."It becomes quite expensive, which we can't afford," Mohsin claims."If all the rules and regulations, all the international conventions regarding ship breaking were observed here, would the industry be able to survive?" Simon asks Mohsin,"No," he replies. "It would be stopped from tomorrow. It'll stop. Has to be stopped."And that, he says, would put 30,000 men out of work and deprive Bangladesh of its source of steel.But for now the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh is sailing full steam ahead. Literally. 60 Minutes boarded a Russian fishing trawler, the Bata, in the final hours of its last voyage.It was eerie walking through the corridors. The lights were on but nobody was home. It was a dead ship sailing.In a sailor's cabin, the sheets were on the bed, a radio and a flashlight were on the table. In the kitchen, there were pots filled with borscht and potatoes that were barely cold.In the dining room there were still Russian books on a table. They too will end up in the market on that dusty road to Chittagong. There was just a skeleton crew on this skeleton shipUp on the bridge, Captain Edwaard Petenko already seemed dressed up for his coming vacation. He had brought the ship all the way from Vladivostok and didn't enjoy the trip.Asked what it feels like taking the ship to the beach, Petenko tells Simon, "No like.""No like. Sometimes even cry. Because…" Capt. Petenko says.He wasn't even in charge any more. The baton had passed to the beaching captain, Enam Chowdrey. He had done this 700 times. They call him the executioner.Beaching a ship is a very delicate operation. It's not simply aiming for the beach - Chowdrey has to calculate the movement of the tides, the swell, the wind, by the minute. In this instance, he has got to wedge the ship between two other vessels already parked there.The workers on ships nearby are cheering. The Bata's arrival means more work, more wages for them. Their backs and their lungs will suffer, but do they have a choice?The Bata steamed its way into its final resting place. The bow got stuck in the sand. A perfect end to the last voyage. In just a few months, it will disappear.And Captain Petenko? He'll head home to Vladivostock. But he'll be back in Bangladesh soon. His company has three more trawlers heading to these shipyards.U.S. Naval and Merchant Marine ships no longer wind up in these yards, not since 1998, when President Clinton passed a moratorium on exporting U.S. ships. Instead, they clog up American waterways. U.S. ship breakers can't keep pace and the Bangladeshis would be only to happy to have theirbusiness. “珍爱河湖·人人有责”幼儿园亲子绘画主题活动方案为进一步加强我园生态文明教育，切实增强幼儿的河湖保护及涉水安全意识，维护良好水生态环境，激发小朋友珍爱生命之水的情感，促进亲子沟通，达到家园共育的目的，根据XX号文件要求，我园特举办“珍爱河湖·人人有责”亲子绘画评比活动。

英语高级视听说下册课后练习题含答案第一单元Section APart I1.What is the mn idea of the conversation?Answer: The mn idea is that the man is interested in going to the concert.2.What is the mn reason the woman doesn’t want to go to theconcert?Answer: The mn reason is that she wants to watch the game on TV.Part II1.What does the man compliment the woman on?Answer: The man compliments the woman on her presentation skills.2.What is the woman’s goal for the presentation?Answer: The woman’s goal is to persuade her audience to invest in her company.Part III1.What is the speaker’s opinion about the book?Answer: The speaker thinks that the book is well-written and informative.2.What is the speaker’s opinion about the author?Answer: The speaker thinks that the author is knowledgeable and experienced.Section BPart I1.What is the mn topic of the talk?Answer: The mn topic is the benefits of regular exercise.2.What is the speaker’s opinion about dieting?Answer: The speaker thinks that dieting alone is not enough to mntn good health.Part II1.What is the woman’s mn concern?Answer: The woman’s mn concern is that she cannot afford the high rent.2.What is the man’s suggestion?Answer: The man suggests that the woman should consider getting a roommate.Part III1.What is the speaker’s opinion about the company?Answer: The speaker thinks that the company’s products are innovative and high-quality.2.What is the speaker’s opinion about the company’s CEO?Answer: The speaker thinks that the CEO is charismatic and visionary.第二单元Section APart I1.What is the mn idea of the conversation?Answer: The mn idea is that the woman is planning a trip to Europe.2.What is the woman’s mn concern?Answer: The woman’s mn concern is that she doesn’t know how to communicate with the locals.Part II1.What is the mn idea of the lecture?Answer: The mn idea is that the human brn is capable of processing large amounts of information.2.What is the speaker’s opinion about multitasking?Answer: The speaker thinks that multitasking can be harmful to productivity and mental health.Part III1.What is the speaker’s opinion about the movie?Answer: The speaker thinks that the movie is entertning and well-made.2.What is the speaker’s opinion about the director?Answer: The speaker thinks that the director is talented and creative.Section BPart I1.What is the mn topic of the talk?Answer: The mn topic is the importance of time management.2.What does the speaker mean by the。

We all know how ships are born, how majestic vessels are nudged into the ocean with a bottle of champagne. But few of us know how they die. And hundreds of ships meet their death every year. From five-star ocean liners, to grubby freighters, literally dumped with all their steel, their asbestos, their toxins on the beaches of some the poorest countries in the world, countries like Bangladesh.You can't really believe how bad it is here, until you see it. It could be as close as you'll get to hell on earth, with the smoke, the fumes, and the heat. The men who labor here are the wretched of the earth, doing dirty, dangerous work, for little more than $1 a day.It's not much of a final resting place, this desolate beach near the city of Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal. Ships are lined up here as at any port, but they'll never leave. Instead, they will be dissected, bolt by bolt, rivet by rivet, every piece of metal destined for the furnaces to be melted down and fashioned into steel rods. The ships don't die easily - they are built to float, not to be ripped apart, spilling toxins, oil and sludge into the surrounding seas.The men who work here are dwarfed by the ships they are destroying. And they dissect the ships by hand. The most sophisticated technology on the beach is a blowtorch. The men carry metal plates, each weighing more than a ton from the shoreline to waiting trucks, walking in step like pallbearers, or like members of a chain gang. They paint images of where they would like to be on the trucks - pictures of paradise far from this wasteland.And when night falls, the work continues and the beach becomes an inferno of smoke and flames and filth.This industry, which employs thousands and supplies Bangladesh with almost all its steel, began with an accident - a cyclone to be precise. In 1965, a violent storm left a giant cargo ship beached on what was then a pristine coastline. It didn't take long before people began ripping the ship apart. They took everything and businessmen took note - perhaps they didn't need a storm to bring ships onto this beach here.Mohammed Mohsin's family has become extremely wealthy bringing ships onto these beaches. He pays millions of dollars for each ship and makes his profit from the steel he sells. The name of his company is PHP, which stands for Peace, Happiness and Prosperity.His latest acquisition is a ship weighing in at 4,000 tons but Mohsin tells Simon that's small by comparison to other vessels that have been gutted on the beaches. They have handled ships as large as 68,000 tons.This the first time Mohsin has seen the 4,000 ton ship close up. In fact buying a ship is not at all like buying a car. He didn't even need to see a picture before he bought itfor $14 million. All he needed to know was its weight and how much the owners were charging for each ton of steel.One of the single most valuable parts of the ship is the propeller. The "small" ships propeller is worth around $35,000 alone, Mohsin estimates.It may be a small ship to Mohsin, but getting onto it from the beach is still a bit delicate.Mohsin's ships don't have seafaring captains anymore - he is the captain now of dying ships and the captain of one of the largest of 30 shipyards on this 10-mile stretch of beach. Some 100 ships are ripped apart on the beach each year, most of them from the west."It is the west's garbage dump," says Roland Buerk, who lives in Bangladesh. He spent a year in these yards, writing a book about the industry. 60 Minutes hired him to guide Simon through the tangled world of shipbreaking.To do the same work in America or England would be very expensive."It would be because in Europe and America when they do this, they do it in dry docks," Buerk explains. "So in actual fact, the owners of these ships are selling them to the yard owners here to break up. If they had to do it in America, they'd have to pay for that process to be carried out. So you see it makes real economic sense to do it here.""So old, out-dated ships that were previously a liability, are now an asset," Simon remarks."Exactly," Buerk agrees. "And that's why they end up on these shores."They are the shores of the most densely populated nation and one of the poorest nations in the world. Bangladesh desperately needs steel for construction but has no iron ore mines. The shipbreaking yards are its mines, providing 80 percent of the nation's steel.But steel is only part of the deal; there are so many things on a ship which are sold off. It is in fact a gigantic recycling operation.You can find everything, including kitchen sinks, at a sprawling roadside market which goes on for miles. When you're driving down this road, it's not a problem if you need a toilet or a life boat or a light bulb. It is estimated that 97 percent of the ship's contents are recycled. The other three percent, the stuff nobody would buy, includingthe hazardous waste, asbestos, arsenic and mercury, are left behind to foul the beaches. "And what we're looking at, which is a recycling operation, is also an environmental disaster," Simon says."That's true. And I think this is really capitalism as red in tooth and claw as it gets. At the moment this is what makes financial sense for everybody. And this is, despite the fact that we might not like it, and it doesn't look pretty, this is how it's done," Buerk says.The workers toil in tough conditions. They have no unions, no safety equipment, and no training. About 50 are said to die in accidents each year; often in explosions set off by blowtorches deep inside the fume-filled holds.You see casualties in the yards, men who were injured here but have no money to go anywhere else. The workers are housed in barracks with no beds, just steel plates scavenged from the ships they break.Many of the workers are not old enough to grow a beard. Some are, quite simply, children. 60 Minutes spoke to several who said they were 14 and had been working here for two years.So what does the man from Peace Happiness and Prosperity say about that?Asked if there are any children working in his yard, Mohsin says, "Not my yard." "Well, we talked to several children," Simon tells Mohsin. "We found a couple who were 14 and said they'd been working there for a couple of years.""They are - if they are working - if they don't work, what they'll do, then? Our government cannot afford it. Their food, shelter and clothing has to be provided by someone whether their parents or the government. None of them can afford it. So what they gonna do?" Mohsin argues."So, you say that child labor is inevitable, necessary in Bangladesh?" Simon asks."If they don't work in ship-breaking yard, they'll work somewhere else. They have to," Mohsin replies.But child labor is only one of the issues. Environmentalists have been doing battle with the industry for years. They say the west has no business dumping its toxic waste on impoverished lands in the east. They condemn the appalling work conditions, the low pay, and the lack of accountability for workers who are killed or injured. Their most important proposal: that ships be cleaned of their toxic materials in the west,before they sail to Bangladesh.That's in line with an international ban which prohibits the shipment of hazardous waste from rich countries to poorer countries.Rezwana Hasan of the Bangladeshi Environmental Lawyers Association is in the forefront of the battle against the industry. She says the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh don't respect even the most minimal environmental standards."And an industry that can't comply with these minimum standards must not operate," she argues. "I mean if you can't comply with the - if you can't pay your worker the minimum wage, you can't operate. You can't - if you can't ensure the minimum environmental safeguard you shouldn't operate."But the owners of the yards argue that environmentalism is a luxury, reserved for the rich nations."It becomes quite expensive, which we can't afford," Mohsin claims."If all the rules and regulations, all the international conventions regarding ship breaking were observed here, would the industry be able to survive?" Simon asks Mohsin,"No," he replies. "It would be stopped from tomorrow. It'll stop. Has to be stopped." And that, he says, would put 30,000 men out of work and deprive Bangladesh of its source of steel.But for now the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh is sailing full steam ahead. Literally. 60 Minutes boarded a Russian fishing trawler, the Bata, in the final hours of its last voyage.It was eerie walking through the corridors. The lights were on but nobody was home. It was a dead ship sailing.In a sailor's cabin, the sheets were on the bed, a radio and a flashlight were on the table. In the kitchen, there were pots filled with borscht and potatoes that were barely cold.In the dining room there were still Russian books on a table. They too will end up in the market on that dusty road to Chittagong. There was just a skeleton crew on this skeleton shipUp on the bridge, Captain Edwaard Petenko already seemed dressed up for his coming vacation. He had brought the ship all the way from Vladivostok and didn'tenjoy the trip.Asked what it feels like taking the ship to the beach, Petenko tells Simon, "No like.""No like. Sometimes even cry. Because…" Capt. Petenko says.He wasn't even in charge any more. The baton had passed to the beaching captain, Enam Chowdrey. He had done this 700 times. They call him the executioner.Beaching a ship is a very delicate operation. It's not simply aiming for the beach - Chowdrey has to calculate the movement of the tides, the swell, the wind, by the minute. In this instance, he has got to wedge the ship between two other vessels already parked there.The workers on ships nearby are cheering. The Bata's arrival means more work, more wages for them. Their backs and their lungs will suffer, but do they have a choice? The Bata steamed its way into its final resting place. The bow got stuck in the sand. A perfect end to the last voyage. In just a few months, it will disappear.And Captain Petenko? He'll head home to Vladivostock. But he'll be back in Bangladesh soon. His company has three more trawlers heading to these shipyards. U.S. Naval and Merchant Marine ships no longer wind up in these yards, not since 1998, when President Clinton passed a moratorium on exporting U.S. ships. Instead, they clog up American waterways. U.S. ship breakers can't keep pace and the Bangladeshis would be only to happy to have their business.。

We all know how ships are born, how majestic vessels are nudged into the ocean with a bottle of champagne. But few of us know how they die. And hundreds of ships meet their death every year. From five-star ocean liners, to grubby freighters, literally dumped with all their steel, their asbestos, their toxins on the beaches of some the poorest countries in the world, countries like Bangladesh.You can't really believe how bad it is here, until you see it. It could be as close as you'll get to hell on earth, with the smoke, the fumes, and the heat. The men who labor here are the wretched of the earth, doing dirty, dangerous work, for little more than $1 a day.It's not much of a final resting place, this desolate beach near the city of Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal. Ships are lined up here as at any port, but they'll never leave. Instead, they will be dissected, bolt by bolt, rivet by rivet, every piece of metal destined for the furnaces to be melted down and fashioned into steel rods. The ships don't die easily - they are built to float, not to be ripped apart, spilling toxins, oil and sludge into the surrounding seas.The men who work here are dwarfed by the ships they are destroying. And they dissect the ships by hand. The most sophisticated technology on the beach is a blowtorch. The men carry metal plates, each weighing more than a ton from the shoreline to waiting trucks, walking in step like pallbearers, or like members of a chain gang. They paint images of where they would like to be on the trucks - pictures of paradise far from this wasteland.And when night falls, the work continues and the beach becomes an inferno of smoke and flames and filth.This industry, which employs thousands and supplies Bangladesh with almost all its steel, began with an accident - a cyclone to be precise. In 1965, a violent storm left a giant cargo ship beached on what was then a pristine coastline. It didn't take long before people began ripping the ship apart. They took everything and businessmen took note - perhaps they didn't need a storm to bring ships onto this beach here.Mohammed Mohsin's family has become extremely wealthy bringing ships onto these beaches. He pays millions of dollars for each ship and makes his profit from the steel he sells. The name of his company is PHP, which stands for Peace, Happiness and Prosperity.His latest acquisition is a ship weighing in at 4,000 tons but Mohsin tells Simon that's small by comparison to other vessels that have been gutted on the beaches. They have handled ships as large as 68,000 tons.This the first time Mohsin has seen the 4,000 ton ship close up. In fact buying a ship is not at all like buying a car. He didn't even need to see a picture before he bought itfor $14 million. All he needed to know was its weight and how much the owners were charging for each ton of steel.One of the single most valuable parts of the ship is the propeller. The "small" ships propeller is worth around $35,000 alone, Mohsin estimates.It may be a small ship to Mohsin, but getting onto it from the beach is still a bit delicate.Mohsin's ships don't have seafaring captains anymore - he is the captain now of dying ships and the captain of one of the largest of 30 shipyards on this 10-mile stretch of beach. Some 100 ships are ripped apart on the beach each year, most of them from the west."It is the west's garbage dump," says Roland Buerk, who lives in Bangladesh. He spent a year in these yards, writing a book about the industry. 60 Minutes hired him to guide Simon through the tangled world of shipbreaking.To do the same work in America or England would be very expensive."It would be because in Europe and America when they do this, they do it in dry docks," Buerk explains. "So in actual fact, the owners of these ships are selling them to the yard owners here to break up. If they had to do it in America, they'd have to pay for that process to be carried out. So you see it makes real economic sense to do it here.""So old, out-dated ships that were previously a liability, are now an asset," Simon remarks."Exactly," Buerk agrees. "And that's why they end up on these shores."They are the shores of the most densely populated nation and one of the poorest nations in the world. Bangladesh desperately needs steel for construction but has no iron ore mines. The shipbreaking yards are its mines, providing 80 percent of the nation's steel.But steel is only part of the deal; there are so many things on a ship which are sold off. It is in fact a gigantic recycling operation.You can find everything, including kitchen sinks, at a sprawling roadside market which goes on for miles. When you're driving down this road, it's not a problem if you need a toilet or a life boat or a light bulb. It is estimated that 97 percent of the ship's contents are recycled. The other three percent, the stuff nobody would buy, includingthe hazardous waste, asbestos, arsenic and mercury, are left behind to foul the beaches. "And what we're looking at, which is a recycling operation, is also an environmental disaster," Simon says."That's true. And I think this is really capitalism as red in tooth and claw as it gets. At the moment this is what makes financial sense for everybody. And this is, despite the fact that we might not like it, and it doesn't look pretty, this is how it's done," Buerk says.The workers toil in tough conditions. They have no unions, no safety equipment, and no training. About 50 are said to die in accidents each year; often in explosions set off by blowtorches deep inside the fume-filled holds.You see casualties in the yards, men who were injured here but have no money to go anywhere else. The workers are housed in barracks with no beds, just steel plates scavenged from the ships they break.Many of the workers are not old enough to grow a beard. Some are, quite simply, children. 60 Minutes spoke to several who said they were 14 and had been working here for two years.So what does the man from Peace Happiness and Prosperity say about that?Asked if there are any children working in his yard, Mohsin says, "Not my yard." "Well, we talked to several children," Simon tells Mohsin. "We found a couple who were 14 and said they'd been working there for a couple of years.""They are - if they are working - if they don't work, what they'll do, then? Our government cannot afford it. Their food, shelter and clothing has to be provided by someone whether their parents or the government. None of them can afford it. So what they gonna do?" Mohsin argues."So, you say that child labor is inevitable, necessary in Bangladesh?" Simon asks."If they don't work in ship-breaking yard, they'll work somewhere else. They have to," Mohsin replies.But child labor is only one of the issues. Environmentalists have been doing battle with the industry for years. They say the west has no business dumping its toxic waste on impoverished lands in the east. They condemn the appalling work conditions, the low pay, and the lack of accountability for workers who are killed or injured. Their most important proposal: that ships be cleaned of their toxic materials in the west,before they sail to Bangladesh.That's in line with an international ban which prohibits the shipment of hazardous waste from rich countries to poorer countries.Rezwana Hasan of the Bangladeshi Environmental Lawyers Association is in the forefront of the battle against the industry. She says the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh don't respect even the most minimal environmental standards."And an industry that can't comply with these minimum standards must not operate," she argues. "I mean if you can't comply with the - if you can't pay your worker the minimum wage, you can't operate. You can't - if you can't ensure the minimum environmental safeguard you shouldn't operate."But the owners of the yards argue that environmentalism is a luxury, reserved for the rich nations."It becomes quite expensive, which we can't afford," Mohsin claims."If all the rules and regulations, all the international conventions regarding ship breaking were observed here, would the industry be able to survive?" Simon asks Mohsin,"No," he replies. "It would be stopped from tomorrow. It'll stop. Has to be stopped." And that, he says, would put 30,000 men out of work and deprive Bangladesh of its source of steel.But for now the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh is sailing full steam ahead. Literally. 60 Minutes boarded a Russian fishing trawler, the Bata, in the final hours of its last voyage.It was eerie walking through the corridors. The lights were on but nobody was home. It was a dead ship sailing.In a sailor's cabin, the sheets were on the bed, a radio and a flashlight were on the table. In the kitchen, there were pots filled with borscht and potatoes that were barely cold.In the dining room there were still Russian books on a table. They too will end up in the market on that dusty road to Chittagong. There was just a skeleton crew on this skeleton shipUp on the bridge, Captain Edwaard Petenko already seemed dressed up for his coming vacation. He had brought the ship all the way from Vladivostok and didn'tenjoy the trip.Asked what it feels like taking the ship to the beach, Petenko tells Simon, "No like.""No like. Sometimes even cry. Because…" Capt. Petenko says.He wasn't even in charge any more. The baton had passed to the beaching captain, Enam Chowdrey. He had done this 700 times. They call him the executioner.Beaching a ship is a very delicate operation. It's not simply aiming for the beach - Chowdrey has to calculate the movement of the tides, the swell, the wind, by the minute. In this instance, he has got to wedge the ship between two other vessels already parked there.The workers on ships nearby are cheering. The Bata's arrival means more work, more wages for them. Their backs and their lungs will suffer, but do they have a choice? The Bata steamed its way into its final resting place. The bow got stuck in the sand. A perfect end to the last voyage. In just a few months, it will disappear.And Captain Petenko? He'll head home to Vladivostock. But he'll be back in Bangladesh soon. His company has three more trawlers heading to these shipyards. U.S. Naval and Merchant Marine ships no longer wind up in these yards, not since 1998, when President Clinton passed a moratorium on exporting U.S. ships. Instead, they clog up American waterways. U.S. ship breakers can't keep pace and the Bangladeshis would be only to happy to have their business.。

If the old saying "What's good for America is good for General Motors, and vice versa" is still true, then we are all in a lot of trouble. General Motors is limping along in the breakdown lane, in need of a lot more than a minor tune-up.With GM's stock trading near an all time low and its bonds rated as junk, the company reported losses of more than $10 billion last year. Unless it stops hemorrhaging money, it will have to be towed into bankruptcy court — a move with consequences that could cascade through the American economy, threatening up to 1 million jobs and changing the dreams of American workers.Correspondent Steve Kroft reports.General Motors is not just another company. For almost a century, it was emblematic of American industrial dominance, with a car for every customer and a brand for every strata of society.Back when Pontiacs were as sexy as Sinatra and Cadillac the synonym for luxury, GM made half the cars in the United States. A job on one of its assembly lines was ticket into the middle class. But that was before the first oil shock, and the Japanese imports. Today, General Motors is losing $24 million a day — and all bets are off."This is not a phantom crisis or a fake crisis. This is a real crisis," says David Cole, is chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, a non-profit consulting firm in Ann Arbor Mich.Cole is widely considered one of the industry's top analysts. He believes that Detroit is now facing what the steel industry and the big airlines have already been through: high labor costs that make it almost impossible to compete."Every one of the Big Three faces a problem right now of about $2,000 to $2,500 per vehicle produced cost disadvantage. If that plays out over time, they're all dead," says Cole. "It's change or die. Everything is driven by a profitable business. If you can't be profitable, you can't be in business. That is, I think, recognition that everybody is aware of."It has certainly not escaped the attention of General Motors chairman Rick Wagoner, who met at the Detroit Auto show. Wagner may have the toughest job in America: running a corporation many analysts believe has become, too big, too bloated and too slow to compete with more nimble foreign competitors.Asked how General Motors got to the point where it is now, Wagoner told Kroft. "We have a long history, almost 100 years. We have a lot of employees. We have a lot of retirees, a lot of dependents. … Promises were made about benefits to thosepeople that weren't very expensive when they were made. And it's really given us some financial challenges."One of them is that most of the people on GM's payroll are no longer making cars. Every month, GM sends out nearly half a million pension checks to former workers, many of whom retired in their 50s after 30 years of service and live in communities where GM plants closed long ago.Then there is the ever-rising cost of health care. GM has one of the most generous plans in America and provides it to 1.1 million people — retirees, workers and their dependents — at a cost of $6 billion a year. That's more than any other company in America.Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University, has done the math. "It comes to about $1,400 a car now," he explains. "That's what the health care premiums of the workers who make that car is. OK?"Chaison says the health care costs are higher than the glass and steel used to make the vehicle. "Much more than any other part. What you're doing when you're buying a car is you're spending a lot of money for the health care benefits of workers who are making that car," he says.It's a cost most of GM's foreign competitors don't have because their workers are usually covered by some form of government health insurance in their own countries. Wagoner says it's one of the promises GM made to workers made in good times that it can barely afford in bad.Asked if he thinks those promises could be kept, Wagoner says, "We feel a responsibility to the people that those promises were made to. We also have a responsibility to insure that our business is successful in the future."That future looks so bleak that the United Auto Workers, the union that represents GM's hourly workers, agreed last year to give back some hard-won concessions, which included a $1 an hour cost-of-living raise for active workers. The concessions also required retirees to pay up to several hundred dollars a year towards medical insurance that had always been free. UAW president Ron Gettelfinger says it was painful but necessary.Gettelfinger admits getting the retirees to pay money toward something they'd been getting for free was a tough sell. "Sure it was hard to sell. First of all it was hard for us to convince ourselves that we needed to do something. It was not the easy decision to make but it was a right decision to make in the long term. Because our concern is the long-term viability of our membership both active and retired when it comes to their benefits or to their wage levels," he tells Kroft.The consensus is that the union may have to give up a lot more, either before or during next year's contract negotiations, if General Motors is to avoid bankruptcy —an outcome that could allow the company to scrap its labor agreements, slash wages and pass off its pension obligations to the federal government."If you or I were given a choice between gold and silver, we'll take the gold every time. Gold is no longer an option. The choice that they're facing, literally, is between lead and silver. If they don't do the right things, they're gonna get lead," says Cole. "Silver is still terrific. I think that's where we're headed. The industry can afford silver, but they can no longer afford gold."General Motors is still the largest automobile manufacturer in the world, and most experts will tell you it has never made better cars and trucks. But its market share has fallen to 24 percent, and it has too many plants and too many people for the number of cars it's selling. GM wants to shut down all or part of a dozen facilities and get rid of 30,000 workers by the end of 2008, but it's hamstrung by its contract with the UAW, which says it would still have to pay these workers under something called the "jobs bank.""The job bank, that is people are paid to essentially full salary and aren't working —can't work. You can't afford literally hundreds of millions of dollars in wages to people that aren't working," says Cole. "So the way to deal with that is to buy 'em out of their job. And that's gonna be a big part of what's happening in just the next few months."The process has already begun. The week before last, General Motors served up one of the biggest buyout packages in corporate history, offering 113,000 hourly employees anywhere $35,000 to $140,000 to walk away from their jobs or take early retirement. The buyout could cost GM up to $2 billion, so last week it sold off a chunk of one of its most profitable business, GMAC's commercial mortgage division, to help pay for it. But the ultimate cost could be much greater for communities all over the Midwest.Several generations of American workers put food on the table and kids through college working at GM factories like the one in Janesville, Wis., where a union job with General Motors was as close as you could get to guaranteed lifetime security.It is hard work with lots of overtime —but in a good year they can make $100,000, with up to five weeks vacation. It's a great job; problem is, it can be done in Mexico now for $3 an hour, and people here are nervous. Almost everyone in Janesville either works for GM or has a relative or family member that does."Everybody knows General Motors is the horse that pulls our cart," says Steve Flood.It's the favorite subject at the Eagle Inn, just down the street from the union hall, where Kroft shared a cup of coffee with retirees Flood and Claude Eakins and current UAW workers Ron Splan and Matt Symons, who make SUVs at the Janesville plant.What would happen to Janesville if GM went into bankruptcy?"We've all got our opinions. But it certainly wouldn't be a pretty picture," says Splan. "There's probably 20 industries in Janesville here that supply directly to the Janesville General Motors plants. So it would be devastating. I mean, there's no doubt what it'd do to Janesville: I mean, it'd be terrible."Asked if he was willing to make more concessions, Flood said, "Sure, you bet. We're gonna make sure GM survives. What we do, I'm not sure. But I'm sure we'll be looking at it that, ya know, before we make any changes. But it's gotta be a shared, ya know.""They know that we're all in the same boat," Splan added. "I mean, if it's got a hole in it, we're all, we're all sinkin'."There are some who have actually suggested bankruptcy might be good for General Motors in the long run —that it would allow the company to reposition itself competitively in the global market. Wagoner isn't one of them."Our view is that's a very bad idea," he says. "First of all, we don't think it's going to happen. We don't think it's a good strategy. And we think a lot of people would lose if we did that, ranging from shareholders to employees to dealers to suppliers. And it's my view that all this talk about bankruptcy is way over selling the risk side of the business."But a lot of things could go wrong. A potential strike at Delphi Corp., GM's major parts supplier, could shut down General Motors assembly lines and create a liquidity crisis. Corporate raider Kirk Kerkorian, whose intentions are unknown, is now GM's largest individual stockholder —and making his presence felt. But most of all, GM needs to begin selling more cars.It needs to revive Buick and Pontiac the same way it resurrected Cadillac, with bold new designs and their own distinct identities.Those cars, which will save GM, or not, are still in blue shrouds at the company's super-secret design center in Warren, Mich., under the watchful eye of 74-year-old vice chairman Bob Lutz, a legendary Detroit design guru, who once ran Chrysler. "Unfortunately this is a car that I'd like to be able to show you, but for competitive reasons we can't show it all. I'll just show you some of the, some of the advancedwork that we're doing on grills —that this is obviously a Cadillac, no concealing that," Lutz said, giving Kroft a peek."Would you have to kill me if I just took this thing and ripped it right out?" Kroft asked."I would not be pleased with you," Lutz replied.Lutz acknowledges that GM became complacent, produced too many anonymous cars with uninspired designs and delegated the design process too low in the corporate structure."During the period of GM's greatness in the 50s and 60s, design ruled. And the finance people ran behind to try to reestablish order and pick up the pieces," says Lutz. "We just lost the focus on design."There is no detail too small to merit Lutz's attention, from sheet metal fits to upgrading interiors, and getting rid of what he calls that "nasty rat fur" upholstery."I mean, the answer is product, product, product, product, product," says Lutz. "And I'm happy to say that my experiences, that automobile companies always do their best products when they're in dire straits, because all the second guessers get out of the way."Lutz says the company has turned the corner on reliability, and J.D. Power quality surveys bear him out. Another encouraging sign came at the Detroit Auto Show when Lutz unveiled the new sleek new Camaro concept car, which debuted to unanimous acclaim and was selected as best car in show. It is exactly what GM needs right now — but in its showrooms, not at an auto show."We're enthused about it and everybody wants to know, 'So, are you gonna build it?'" says Wagoner.The answer to that question, Wagoner says, is a firm maybe. "We'd like to do it. … We haven't made the call. We've introduced it as a concept. Sometimes we do that to see how people react to it.""The best car in the show," Kroft remarked."Yeah, well I just got that information," Wagoner says. "I think that does suggest that if we didn't try to build this, we might be brain dead. Stay tuned."By Frank Devine。

UNIT3 A PILL TO FORGET(CBS) If there were something you could take after experiencing a painful or traumatic event that would permanently weaken your memory of what had just happened, would you take it? As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, it’s an id ea that may not be so far off, and that has some critics alarmed, and some trauma victims filled with hope."I couldn't get my body to stop shaking. I was trembling, constantly trembling. Memories of it would just come back, reoccurring over and over and over," subway conductor Beatriz Arguedas recalls.Last Sept. 30, Beatriz was driving her normal route on the Red Line in Boston when one of her worst fears came to pass: "Upon entering one of the busiest stations, a man jumped in front of my train, to commitsuicide," she explains.Beatriz saw the man jump. "We sort of made eye contact and then I felt the thud from him hitting the train and then the crackling sound underneath the train and, then, of course, my heart starts thumping," she recalls."She came into our emergency room afterwards, very upset. No physical injury. Entirely a psychological trauma," says Dr. Roger Pitman, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School who has studied and treated patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, for 25 years."They're caught up so much with this past event that it's constantly in their mind," Pitman explains. "They're living it over and over and over as if it's happening again. And they just can't get involved in real life."When Beatriz arrived in the emergency room, Pitman enrolled her in an experimental study of a drug called propranolol, a medication commonly used for high blood pressure ... and unofficially for stage fright. Pitman thought it might do something almost magical – trick Beat riz’s brain into making a weaker memory of the event she had just experienced.In the study, which is still under way, half the subjects get propranolol;half get a placebo.Asked whether he knows if Beatriz got the drug or the placebo, Dr. Pitman says he has no idea and neither does she, and that the research team won'tknow for another two years.If Pitman is right, the results could fundamentally change the way accident victims, rape victims, even soldiers are treated after theyexperience trauma.The story begins with some surprising discoveries about memory. It turns out our memories are sort of like Jello – they take time to solidify in our brains. And while they're setting, it's possible to make them stronger or weaker. It all depends on the stress hormone adrenaline.The man who discovered this is James McGaugh, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine.McGaugh studies memory in rats, and he invited Stahl to watch the making of a rat memory – in this case how a rat who's never been in this tank of water before learns how to find a clear plastic platform just belowthe surface."He’ll swim around randomly," McGaugh explains. The rat cannot see the platform, since his eyes are on the top of his head.The rat will swim around the edge for a long time, until eventually he ventures out and by chance bumps into the platform. The next day, he'll find the platform a little bit faster.But another rat, who had learned where the platform was the day prior, and then received a shot of adrenaline immediately afterwards, today swaminstantly to the platform.Adrenaline actually made this rat's brain remember better, and McGaugh believes the same thing happens in people. "Suppose I said to you, 'You know, I've watched your programs a lot over the years, and although it pains me to have to tell you this, I think you're one of worst people I've ever seen on … now don't take it, don't take it personally,'" McGaughsays."So, my stress system would go into overdrive, no question," Stahl says."Even with my telling you that it's not true, there's nothing to keep you from blushing, from feeling warm all over," McGaugh points out. "That's the adrenaline. And I dare say that you're gonna remember my having said that long after you've forgotten the other details of our discussion here.I guarantee it."McGaugh says that’s why we remember important and emotional events in our lives more than regular day-to-day experiences. The next step in his research was to see what would happen when adrenaline was blocked; he started experimenting with propranolol."Propranolol sits on that nerve cell and blocks it, so that, think of this as being a key, and this is a lock, the hole in the lock is blocked because of propranolol sitting there. So adrenaline can be present, but it can'tdo its job," McGaugh explains.McGaugh showed Stahl a third rat that had learned where the platform was on the previous day and then received an injection of propranolol. The next day, the rat swam around the edge, as if he had forgotten there everwas a platform out there.Across the country at Harvard, Roger Pitman read McGaugh's studies and a light bulb went on. "When I read about this, I said, 'This has got to be how post-traumatic stress disorder works.' Because think about what happens to a person. First of all, they have a horribly traumatic event, and they have intense fear and helplessness. So that intense fear and helplessness is gonna stimulate adrenaline," Pitman says. "And then what do we find three months or six months or 20 years later? Excessively strongmemories."Pitman figured he could block that cycle by giving trauma victims propranolol right away ... before adrenaline could make the memories too strong. He started recruiting patients for a small pilot study. One of the first was Kathleen Logue, a paralegal who had been knocked down in the middle of a busy Boston street by a bicyclist."He just hit the whole left side of my body. And it seemed like forever that I was laying in the middle of State Street, downtown Boston," Logueremembers.She says she was terrified that she was just going to get run over.As part of the study, Logue took propranolol four times a day for 10 days. Like the others who got the drug, three months later she showed no physiological signs of PTSD, while several subjects who got a placebo did. Those results got Pitman funding for a larger study by the NationalInstitutes of Health.But then the President’s Council on Bioethics condemned the study in a report that said our memories make us who we are and that "re-writing" memories pharmacologically … risks "undermining our true identity.""This is a quote. 'It risks making shameful acts seem less shameful or terrible acts less terrible than they really are,'" Stahl reads to Logue."A terrible act," she replies. "Why should you have to live with it every day of your life? It doesn't erase the fact that it happened. It doesn't erase your memory of it. It makes it easier to remember and function."David Magnu s, director of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, says he worries that it won't be just trauma victims trying todull painful memories."From the point of view of a pharmaceutical industry, they're going to have every interest in having as many people as possible diagnosed with this condition and have it used as broadly as possible. That's the reality of how drugs get introduced and utilized," Magnus argues.He’s concerned it will be used for trivial reasons. "If I embarrass myself at a party Friday night and instead of feeling bad about it I could take a pill then I'm going to avoid –not have to avoid making a fool of myselfat parties," Magnus says."So you think that that embarrassment and all of that is teaching us?"Stahl asks."Absolutely," Magnus says. "Our breakups, our relationships, as painful as they are, we learn from some of those painful experiences. They makeus better people."But while the ethicists debate the issue, the science is moving forward. Researchers have shown in rat studies that propranolol can also blunt oldmemories.Pitman wondered: Could it work in humans? He teamed up with Canadian colleague Alain Brunet, who searched for people with long-standing PTSD, like Rita Magil. She had suffered for three years from nightmares aftera life-threatening car accident.Another study subject is Louise O'Donnell-Jasmin, who was raped by a doctor at the age of 12. "He raped me on his desk, on a chair, and on the floor. It, for me, it was like I was dying inside," she remembers. "Theworld had ended."O'Donnell-Jasmin was haunted by the rape for more than 30 years. She never felt comfortable undressing in front of her husband and suffered from recurrent flashbacks and nightmares.The study was simple: Subjects came in and were asked to think about and write down every detail they could remember about their trauma; in Magil's case, her car accident, reactivating the memory in her brain. She was thengiven propranolol.Rita says she suffered no side effects.A week later, electrodes measured her body’s stress response as she listened to a retelling of her trauma. Asked what happened, Magil says,"No reaction."And she says she had no more nightmares.The patient who made the most dramatic recovery turned out to beO'Donnell-Jasmin, but there's a catch, because she was in a control group and therefore wasn’t supposed to improve at all.O'Donnell-Jasmin was given propranolol, but unlike Magil, she took the drug while watching a pleasant movie, not after telling every detail about her rape. And yet, a week later, she noticed a change. "I wake up. And I find myself undressing. And my husband is there. And I realize I'm undressing, and I'm not feeling as though I need to hide under the bedanymore," she explains.Asked if it is gone, O'Donnell-Jasmin says, "Yes. The link, what held the emotions to the memories, it's like the umbilical cord has been cut. And there is no way I can access the emotions anymore. And furthermore, everyday it gets better.""Louise got a great result. But, scientifically, it confused things,"Pitman says.He speculates that despite the pleasant movie, O'Donnell-Jasmin may have been thinking about the rape when she took the propranolol, and that'swhy it worked. "The only way we're going to know is to study another 10 or a hundred patients like Louise and see how it pans out,” Pitman says.That this drug could actually alter and weaken old memories means we're talking about a potentially revolutionary advance in treating posttraumatic stress disorder."Are you at all concerned that since propranolol is already out there available for doctors to prescribe for heart conditions, for stage fright, that some soldier who’s come back and is having terrible nightmares can go to his doctor and get it right now? Is that a concern for you, or nota concern?" Stahl asks McGaugh."No. Not a concern for me. Not a concern," he replies. "If it helps, whynot.""Let me tell you something that you told us before. I'm quoting you. 'It's like they went in and altered my mind,'" Stahl tells Louise.O'Donnell-Jasmin admits it's very creepy. "This study has taken away a part of me that's been in me for so long, and that I find very weird,"she says."It's not normal to have gone through a rape and feel nothing. Or to have gone through something traumatic … and feel as though it happened to somebody else," Stahl tells Pitman."Let's suppose you have a person who comes in after a physical assault and they've had some bones broken, and they're in intense pain. Should we deprive them of morphine because we might be taking away the full emotional experience? Who would ever argue that?" Pitman replies."No," Stahl says."Why should psychiatry be different? I think that somehow behind this argument lurks the notion that mental disorders are not the same as physical disorders. That treating them or not is more of an optionalthing," Pitman says.The studies are still in their early stages, so O'Donnell-Jasmin's apparent positive result isn't conclusive, though to her, it's absolutelyreal.Asked if there is any sense that she has lost any of her identity, O'Donnell-Jasmin says, "I have regained my identity. What was broken whenI was 12 was fixed. They have given me back myself."And now the U.S. military has taken note: Pitman recently heard from the Army that he will be receiving funding starting next summer to try the same propranolol experiment done with Magil and O'Donnell-Jasmin o treat American soldiers returning from Afghanistan and IraqUnit 4 Brain ManAlmost 25 years ago, 60 Minutes introduced viewers to George Finn, whose talent was immortalized in the movie "Rain Man." George has a condition known as savant syndrome, a mysterious disorder of the brain where someone has a spectacular skill, even genius, in a mind that is otherwise extremely limited.Morley Safer met another savant, Daniel Tammet, who is called "Brain Man" in Britain. But unlike most savants, he has no obvious mental disability, and most important to scientists, he can describe his own thought process. He may very well be a scientific Rosetta stone, a key to understanding the brain.________________________________________Back in 1983, George Finn, blessed or obsessed with calendar calculation, could give you the day if you gave him the date."What day of the week was August 13th, 1911?" Safer quizzed Finn."A Sunday," Finn replied."What day of the week was May 20th, 1921?" Safer asked."Friday," Finn answered.George Finn is a savant. In more politically incorrect times he would have been called an "idiot savant" - a mentally handicapped or autistic person whose brain somehow possesses an island of brilliance.Asked if he knew how he does it, Finn told Safer, "I don't know, but it's just that, that's fantastic I can do that."If this all seems familiar, there?s a reason: five years after the 60 Minutes broadcast, Dustin Hoffman immortalized savants like George in the movie "Rain Man."Which brings us to that other savant we mentioned: Daniel Tammet. He is an Englishman, who is a 27-year-old math and memory wizard."I was born November 8th, 1931," Safer remarks."Uh-huh. That's a prime number. 1931. And you were born on a Sunday. And this year, your birthday will be on a Wednesday. And you'll be 75," Tammet tells Safer.It is estimated there are only 50 true savants living in the world today, and yet none are like Daniel. He is articulate, self-sufficient, blessed with all of the spectacular ability of a savant, but with very little of the disability. Take his math skill, for example.Asked to multiply 31 by 31 by 31 by 31, Tammet quickly - and accurately - responded with "923,521."And it?s not just calculating. His gift of memory is stunning. Briefly show him a long numerical sequence and he?ll recite it right back to you. And he can do it backwards, to boot.That feat is just a warm-up for Daniel Tammet. He first made headlines at Oxford, when he publicly recited the endless sequence of numbers embodied by the Greek letter "Pi." Pi, the numbers we use to calculate the dimensions of a circle, are usually rounded off to 3.14. But its numbers actually go on to infinity.Daniel studied the sequence - a thousand numbers to a page."And I would sit and I would gorge on them. And I would just absorb hundreds and hundreds at a time," he tells Safer.It took him several weeks to prepare and then Daniel headed to Oxford, where with number crunchers checking every digit, he opened the floodgates of his extraordinary memory.Tammet says he was able to recite, in a proper order, 22,514 numbers. It took him over five hours and he did it without a single mistake.Scientists say a memory feat like this is truly extraordinary. Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and his team at the California Center for Brain Study tested Daniel extensively after his Pi achievement.What did he make of him?"I was surprised at how articulate and intelligent he was, and was able to interact socially and introspect on his own-abilities," says Dr. Ramachandran.And while that introspection is extremely rare among savants, Daniel?s ability to describe how his mind works could be invaluable to scientists studying the brain, our least understood organ."Even how you and I do 17 minus nine is a big mystery. You know, how are these little wisps of jelly in your brain doing that computation? We don't know that," Dr. Ramachandran explains.It may seem to defy logic, but Ramachandran believes that a savant?s genius could actually result from brain injury. "One possibility is that many other parts of the brain are functioning abnormally or sub-normally. And this allows the patient to allocate all his attentional resources to the one remaining part," he explains. "And there's a lot of clinical evidence for this. Some patients have a stroke and suddenly, their artistic skills improve."That theory fits well with Daniel. At the age of four, he suffered a massive epileptic seizure. He believes that seizure contributed to his condition. Numbers were no longer simply numbers and he had developed a rare crossing of the senses known as synesthesia."I see numbers in my head as colors and shapes and textures. So when I see a long sequence, the sequence forms landscapes in my mind," Tammet explains. "Every number up to 10,000, I can visualize in this way, has it's own color, has it's own shape, has it's own texture."For example, when Daniel says he sees Pi, he does those instant computations, he is not calculating, but says the answer simply appears to him as a landscape of colorful shapes."The shapes aren't static. They're full of color. They're full of texture. In a sense, they're full of life," he says.Asked if they?re beautiful, Tammet says, "Not all of them. Some of them are ugly. 289 is an ugly number. I don't like it very much. Whereas 333, for example, is beautiful to me. It's round. It's?.""Chubby," Safer remarks.'It's-yes. It's chubby,' Tammet agrees.Yet even with the development of these extraordinary abilities as a child, nobody sensed that Daniel was a prodigy, including his mother, Jennifer. But he was different."He was constantly counting things," Jennifer remembers. "I think, what first attracted him to books, was the actual numbers on each page. And he just loved counting."Asked if she thinks there?s a connection between his epilepsy and his rare talent, she tells Safer, "He was always different from-when he was really a few weeks old, I noticed he was different. So I'm not sure that it's entirely that, but I think it might have escalated it."Daniel was also diagnosed with Asperger?s Syndrome-a mild form of autism. It made for a painful childhood."I would flap my hands sometimes when I was excited, or pull at my fingers, and pull at my lips," Tammet remembers. "And of course, the children saw these things and would repeat them back to me, and tease me about them. And I would put my fingers in my ears and count very quickly in powers of two. Two, four, eight, 16, 32, 64.""Numbers were my friends. And they never changed. So, they were reliable.I could trust them," he says.And yet, Daniel did not retreat fully into that mysterious prison of autism, as many savants do. He believes his large family may have actually forced him to adapt."Because my parents, having nine children, had so much to do, so much to cope with, I realized I had to do for myself," he says.He now runs his own online educational business. He and his partner Neil try to keep a low profile, despite his growing fame.Yet the limits of his autism are always there. "I find it difficult to walk in the street sometimes if there are lots of people around me. If there's lots of noise, I put my fingers in my ears to block it out,' he says.That anxiety keeps him close to home. He can?t drive, rarely goes shopping, and finds the beach a difficult place because of his compulsion to count the grains of sand. And it manifests itself in other ways, like makinga very precise measurement of his cereal each morning: it must be exactly45 grams of porridge, no more, no less.Daniel was recently profiled in a British documentary called ?Brainman.? The producers posed a challenge that he could not pass up: Learn a foreign language in a week - and not just any foreign language, but Icelandic, considered to be one of the most difficult languages to learn.In Iceland, he studied and practiced with a tutor. When the moment of truth came and he appeared on TV live with a host, the host said, "I was amazed. He was responding to our questions. He did understand them very well and I thought that his grammar was very good. We are very proud of our language and that someone is able to speak it after only one week, that?s just great.""Do you think that Daniel, in a certain way, represents a real pathway to further understanding the brain?" Safer asks Dr. Ramachandran."I think one could say that time and again in science, something that looks like a curiosity initially often leads to a completely new direction of research," Ramachandran replies. "Sometimes, they provide the golden key. Doesn't always happen. Sometimes it's just mumbo-jumbo. But that may well be true with savants."Daniel continues to volunteer for scientists who want to understand his amazing brain. But he is reluctant to become what he calls ?a performing seal? and has refused most offers to cash in on his remarkable skills."People all the time asking me to choose numbers for the lottery. Or to invent a time machine. Or to come up with some great discovery," he explains. "But my abilities are not those that mean that I can do at everything."But he has written a book about his experiences, entitled "Born on a Blue Day."He also does motivational speeches for parents of autistic children-yet one more gift of his remarkable brain.But at the end of the day-genius or not-that brain does work a little differently."One hour after we leave today, and I will not remember what you look like. And I will find it difficult to recognize you, if I see you again. I will remember your handkerchief. And I will remember you have four buttons on your sleeve. And I'll remember the type of tie you're wearing. It's the details that I remember," Tammet tells Safer.And it?s the details that make us all so different. One man may see numbers as a tedious necessity of modern life, another sees them as the essence of life."Pi is one of the most beautiful things in all the world and if I can share that joy in numbers, if I can share that in some small measure with the world through my writing and through my speaking, then I feel that I will have done something useful," he says.Unit 5We all know how ships are born, how majestic vessels are nudged into the ocean with a bottle of champagne. But few of us know how they die. And hundreds of ships meet their death every year. From five-star ocean liners, to grubby freighters, literally dumped with all their steel, their asbestos, their toxins on the beaches of some the poorest countries in the world, countries like Bangladesh. You can't really believe how bad it is here, until you see it. It could be as close as you'll get to hell on earth, with the smoke, the fumes, and the heat. The men who labor here are the wretched of the earth, doing dirty, dangerous work, for little more than $1 a day. It's not much of a final resting place, this desolate beach near the city of Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal. Ships are lined up here as at any port, but they'll never leave. Instead, they will be dissected, bolt by bolt, rivet by rivet, every piece of metal destined for the furnaces to be melted down and fashioned into steel rods. The ships don't die easily - they are built to float, not to be ripped apart, spilling toxins, oil and sludge into the surrounding seas. The men who work here are dwarfed by the ships they are destroying. And theydissect the ships by hand. The most sophisticated technology on the beachis a blowtorch. The men carry metal plates, each weighing more than a ton from the shoreline to waiting trucks, walking in step like pallbearers,or like members of a chain gang. They paint images of where they would like to be on the trucks - pictures of paradise far from this wasteland. And when night falls, the work continues and the beach becomes an infernoof smoke and flames and filth. This industry, which employs thousands and supplies Bangladesh with almost all its steel, began with an accident- a cyclone to be precise. In 1965, a violent storm left a giant cargo ship beached on what was then a pristine coastline. It didn't take long before people began ripping the ship apart. They took everything and businessmen took note - perhaps they didn't need a storm to bring ships onto this beach here. Mohammed Mohsin's family has become extremely wealthy bringing ships onto these beaches. He pays millions of dollarsfor each ship and makes his profit from the steel he sells. The name of his company is PHP, which stands for Peace, Happiness and Prosperity. His latest acquisition is a ship weighing in at 4,000 tons but Mohsin tells Simon that's small by comparison to other vessels that have been guttedon the beaches. They have handled ships as large as 68,000 tons. This the first time Mohsin has seen the 4,000 ton ship close up. In fact buyinga ship is not at all like buying a car. He didn't even need to see a picture before he bought itfor $14 million. All he needed to know was its weight and how much the owners were charging for each ton of steel. One of the single most valuable parts of the ship is the propeller. The "small" ships propelleris worth around $35,000 alone, Mohsin estimates. It may be a small ship to Mohsin, but getting onto it from the beach is still a bit delicate. Mohsin's ships don't have seafaring captains anymore - he is the captain now of dying ships and the captain of one of the largest of 30 shipyards on this 10-mile stretch of beach. Some 100 ships are ripped apart on the beach each year, most of them from the west. "It is the west's garbage dump," says Roland Buerk, who lives in Bangladesh. He spent a year in these yards, writing a book about the industry. 60 Minutes hired him to guide Simon through the tangled world of shipbreaking. To do the same work in America or England would be very expensive. "It would be becausein Europe and America when they do this, they do it in dry docks," Buerk explains. "So in actual fact, the owners of these ships are selling them to the yard owners here to break up. If they had to do it in America, they'd have to pay for that process to be carried out. So you see it makes real economic sense to do it here." "So old, out-dated ships that were previously a liability, are now an asset," Simon remarks. "Exactly," Buerk agrees. "And that's why they end up on these shores." They are the shores of the most densely populated nation and one of the poorest nations in the world. Bangladesh desperately needs steel for construction but has no iron ore mines. The shipbreaking yards are its mines, providing 80 percent of the nation's steel. But steel is only part of the deal; there are so many things on a ship which are sold off. It is in fact a gigantic recycling operation. You can find everything, including kitchen sinks, at a sprawling roadside market which goes on for miles. When you're driving down this road, it's not a problem if you need a toilet or a life boat or a light bulb. It is estimated that 97 percent of the ship's contents are recycled. The other three percent, the stuff nobody would buy, including。